Acting up for democracy

Can Tom Stoppard, Steven Spielberg and Mick Jagger prevent actors at the Belarus Free Theatre from being murdered?

Stephanie Pan in a Belarus Free Theatre production (Nikolai Khalezin)
From the comfort of sofa-bound Britain, “needing the oxygen of publicity”
conjures up the desperate antics of the D-listers in I’m a Celebrity. For
Natalia Koliada, however, publicity-seeking is a deadly serious business. In
2005, Koliada cofounded the Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) with her journalist
husband, Nikolai Khalezin. For their underground organisation, a high
international profile confers a degree of protection at home. She has no
doubt that the championing of her outlawed company’s work by figures such as
Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger, Vaclav Havel, Tom Stoppard and the late
Harold Pinter has ensured that, although BFT members are continually
harassed by the authorities, none has yet disappeared without trace.

Koliada and her colleagues have good reason to fear for their lives. In
September, their friend and associate Oleg Bebenin, a co-founder of the
country’s pro-democracy movement, Charter 97, was found hanged. Nobody who
knew him trusts the coroner’s verdict